Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Restructuring municipal power in Paris proved more complicated. During the elections to the Estates General in 1789, the city had been divided into sixty electoral districts. After the elections were over, the electoral assemblies in each of these districts ought to have disappeared. In the course of the eventful year that followed, however, many of them transformed themselves into lively debating clubs and even assumed some of the responsibilities of local government. In this way, the districts became permanent and provided a focus for the political activity of many ordinary Parisians. After the storming of the Bastille, they converged on the Hôtel de Ville and established a new municipal committee for governing revolutionary Paris. The driving force behind this committee (or Commune de Paris, as it was known) came from the vocal crowd of political activists who had brought it into being. Some of these activists, George Jacques Danton, for example, and others from the Cordeliers district on the left bank of the river Seine, were far more radical than the moderate majority on the new committee. As captain of the citizens’ militia, or National Guard, in the Cordeliers district, Danton was fast becoming a rabble-rousing force to be reckoned with in his own right. A tall, broad, athletic man with a rugged face and rough, loud voice, he clashed bitterly with General Lafayette, the commander in chief of the National Guard, over the organization of Paris. Lafayette wanted to see a strong municipal authority at the city’s center, supported by well-disciplined National Guardsmen whereas Danton championed the right of Paris’s sixty districts to a greater amount of representative and administrative independence. Danton saw no reason to back down.

  At first it was unclear whose side the assembly was on. Many of the deputies were grateful to the radical Paris districts for bringing about the fall of the Bastille and thus augmenting their own authority over the king. But when it came to discussing the reconstitution of Paris’s municipal power, the assembly proposed abolishing the sixty districts and replacing them with forty-eight sections that would elect the municipal authority. This seemed a deliberate attempt to break up groups of political activists; certainly Danton saw it as a direct attack on his local power base. Inside the assembly, Robespierre was a staunch defender of the districts. Addressing his colleagues, he argued for retaining the sixty districts, at least until the new constitution had come into effect, especially for the purpose of surveillance:

  In this city, the home of principles, and opposed factions, it is not possible to rely on ordinary resources against those who menace liberty; it is necessary for the city in general to conserve its achievement and yours. Think of where you are: although you have done a great deal, you have not done everything yet. I dare say that you ought to be more anxious now than if you had not already begun your [revolutionary] work. Who among you can guarantee that without the active surveillance of the districts, those who seek to obstruct your projects won’t use more efficacious means? Do not be seduced by a deceptive calm—peace must not be mistaken for the sleep of carelessness.19

  If he hoped to frighten the assembly or help the Cordeliers with such rhetoric, Robespierre failed. Mirabeau answered him in an ironic, scornful tone: “M. de Robespierre has brought to the tribune a zeal that is more patriotic than reflective…. We must not mistake the exaltation of principles for sublime principles.” In other words, Mirabeau warned his colleagues to be careful, to identify the actual content of Robespierre’s arguments and not merely merely respond to his passionate presentation. Several of the newspapers commented on Robespierre’s hysterical and anxious tone. In the assembly, reactionary deputies who usually opposed him applauded loudly on this occasion. Maybe they thought he had discredited himself by intervening so bizarrely or perhaps they believed that retaining the sixty districts would lead to a backlash against radical deputies like him. By the end of the debate, however, the districts were a lost cause. The assembly voted to abolish them, and the Cordeliers were merged into the new section of the Théâtre français before the end of the year. Since the Cordeliers had a policy of deferring to the assembly’s decisions, they focused their hatred and resentment elsewhere—on General Lafayette, on Bailly, the mayor of Paris, and on the Commune. Their constructive energy went into forming the Cordeliers Club, to keep alive the district’s revolutionary spirit. It met on the left bank of the Seine, in the monastery church of the Cordeliers (or Franciscan Observantists). Danton, who lived nearby, went there every morning at nine, when the tocsin was rung. Already it was his club, a rallying point for workingmen, who paid just a penny a month to belong. Its doors were always open.

  THE FUTURE OF the church and its enormous wealth (sixty million livres, according to one mid-eighteenth-century estimate) was the next divisive issue facing the assembly. When the deputies dismantled the remnants of feudalism on the euphoric night of 4 August 1789, they had agreed to redeem church tithes, instead of simply abolishing them without compensation. But since then there had been signs of reneging on this promise. “They wish to be free, but they do not know how to be just,” complained the abbé Sieyès about some of his colleagues in the assembly.20 It was obvious to everyone that the clergy could not continue as a separate privileged order now that the nation had asserted its inviolable right to sovereignty. But, Sieyès insisted, this did not mean that its property could be appropriated illegally—the right to property, after all, was one of those recently enshrined in the Declaration of Rights. Besides which, the clergy (unlike the nobility) was not simply a parasitical elite: it provided crucial services in areas of health and education and cared for the poor, in addition to organizing the religious ceremonies still central to the lives of most French people. From this perspective, the church was a branch of public administration that would need to be incorporated into the new constitution or remodeled under it: the assembly must reconcile the remnants of the old regime’s religious institutions with its new revolutionary principles. These arguments drew down torrents of abuse on Sieyès’s head. Could the radical theorist of 1789 have turned reactionary overnight? Was the author of the incendiary pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? first and foremost a conservative priest after all? “Are you going to abandon the role of legislators to reveal yourselves as—what? Antipriests?” sneered Sieyès in response to his critics.21 But as so often, his biting cleverness and sharp reasoning were wasted on the unruly assembly, cheered on by anticlerical journalists and spectators in the public gallery.

  Robespierre was neither antipriest nor anticlerical. Indeed, it is often hard to tell where he stood on the future of the church. On the motion to confirm Roman Catholicism as the state religion he was silenced: “M. de Robespierre was about to speak, when someone demanded a vote.”22 Tantalizingly, we will never know what he might have said. On other occasions, when he did manage to make himself heard, Robespierre’s interventions were idiosyncratic. Sometimes he was as vehemently critical as he had been when he lost his temper with the archbishop of Nîmes back in Versailles, and often he returned to the interpretation of Christian doctrine he had put forward on that occasion. Christianity, in his view, was the religion of the poor and the pure at heart—conspicuous wealth and luxury should have no part in it. Sell everything and give to the destitute—this was the advice Jesus Christ gave his followers, and Robespierre echoed it in the assembly’s constitutional debates. When the question of what was to be done with church lands and revenues arose, he urged the nation to appropriate them: “Church property belongs to the people; and to demand that the clergy shall use it to help the people is merely to put it to its original purpose.”23 In itself this line of argument was common enough, but Robespierre added his peculiar stamp to it—according to him, the poor were oppressed not only by their hunger and other neglected needs but also by the spectacle of self-indulgent clerics insensitively squandering what was rightfully theirs. The poor were scandalized and their moral outrage was more than justified.

  A few weeks later he made another characteristically odd intervention, arguing that ex-monks were entitled to more generous pensions than
they were being offered by recently suppressed religious orders. It was impossible, he said, to estimate the real wealth of these orders. They had been living in fear of the Revolution and had long been preparing for it by carefully concealing their wealth. Here was an early example of Robespierre’s growing tendency to suspect hidden conspiracies. Church wealth was indeed difficult to quantify, but more because it took so many different forms and was diffused throughout the whole country than because counterrevolutionary monks and clerics had been scheming to conceal it. Later in 1790, the assembly published a list of the revenues of all the archbishoprics, bishoprics, and abbeys, including the information that the abbey of Saint-Vaast in Arras had an income of 400,000 livres and the bishop of Arras drew a stipend of 92,000 livres. Such figures would have confirmed Robespierre in his perceptions of ecclesiastical decadence.

  Robespierre made his longest and most interesting speech on the church in May 1790, when the assembly was embroiled in discussions about the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This document had taken a year to draft and would—it was hoped—reconcile what remained of the church with the Revolution. In fact, it plunged France into violent strife and would later be regarded (by the abbé Sieyès, among others) as the assembly’s first really serious mistake. In essence, the proposals rejected the pope’s authority over the church in France, reduced the number of dioceses from 137 to 83 (thus aligning them with the country’s new administrative departments), stipulated that the clergy would now be paid by the state rather than through tithes, and provided for the election of priests and bishops by the people. Robespierre spoke in support of all these changes. As usual, he argued from clear principles to destructive effect. He defined priests as public officials, “simply magistrates whose duty it is to maintain and carry on public worship.”24 Any aspect of the church that was not useful to society must go. Cathedrals, religious colleges, even bishops or priests, if they were not publicly useful, would have to disappear. Robespierre was especially pleased by the prospect of the people electing their own church officials. In accordance with his strict democratic principles, he dismissed the suggestion that the existing clergy might play a prominent role in such elections; instead the clergy should be chosen through the pure, unmediated expression of popular will.

  Toward the end of his speech, Robespierre suddenly did something outrageous: he raised the issue of married priests. Many of his colleagues agreed with him that the clergy could not continue as a privileged order, that ministers of the church were not substantially different from any other public officials and should be chosen by the people—but an end to celibacy, and all the trouble it would cause with the pope in Rome, was a step too far for the assembly: a barrage of disapproval cut off Robespierre’s speech. It is somewhat puzzling that he took it upon himself to propose something so contentious. One possible explanation is that he was attempting to steal Mirabeau’s thunder because he had designs on the radical leader’s mantle. The great orator himself had commissioned one of his several ghostwriters (a Swiss man named Reybaz), to prepare a speech on priestly celibacy, and he was furious when Robespierre preempted him by ineffectually raising the matter in the assembly.25

  Back in Arras, Augustin was particularly unnerved by this development. He wrote warning his brother that “your motion for the marriage of priests has given you the reputation of an unbeliever among all our great philosophers in Artois…. You will lose the esteem of the peasantry if you renew this motion. People are using it as a weapon against you and talk of nothing but your irreligion, etc. Perhaps it would be better not to support it anymore…. Let me know if you would like me to come to Paris.”26 Though Augustin was highly concerned with protecting Robespierre’s local reputation, he was desperate to join his brother in Paris at the center of the Revolution. Meanwhile, at his desk in the Marais, Robespierre was inundated with letters on every side of the issue, sometimes in verse. “Poems in Latin, French, Greek and even Hebrew arrived from the four corners of France, poems of 500, 700, 1,500 couplets rained down upon the rue Saintonge.”27 Wry as ever, he remarked to his secretary across his bursting mailbag, “Do you still believe there is a shortage of poets in France? They are, at any rate, pouring forth from the cloisters and monasteries.” According to Villiers, Robespierre dutifully acknowledged all these missives and meticulously reclaimed the postage. Whether or not the correspondents supported his views, the letters were evidence that his reputation outside the assembly was continuing to grow. “I doubt if a single law that he has proposed has ever been carried,” said his old school friend Camille, as the constitutional debates drew to a close in 1791.28 Even so, Robespierre was fast becoming a figure in national politics.

  THE JOURNALISTS AND spectators who came to observe the Assembly from the public galleries at the Manège were not the only source of Robespierre’s growing reputation. He also owed his fame to the Jacobin Club, an outgrowth of the Breton Club that had met in Versailles at the Café Amaury. After the move to Paris, some of the original members of the Breton Club rented the refectory of a Dominican monastery, conveniently close to the Manège, as their new meeting place.29 In Paris, the Dominicans were nicknamed the Jacobins because their first religious house in the city was in the rue Saint-Jacques. Over time this nickname was transferred to the political club meeting in the monastery, but initially the remnants of the Breton Club called themselves the Society of the Friends of the Constitution.30 Whereas the organization of the Breton Club had been obscure, the new club established clear rules and regulations. There was to be a president, four secretaries, and a treasurer, and all these offices were to be rotated. While the club would admit members who were not deputies to the National Assembly, the relatively high membership fees (twelve livres to join and twenty-four livres annual subscription) assured that only educated and serious-minded male supporters of the Revolution would join (women were restricted to spectator seats). Aside from covering the club’s running costs, the membership subscriptions were used to finance the publication of important speeches, which broadened the club’s influence. The candlelit meetings in the old monastery gradually acquired a central role in revolutionary politics. At the Jacobins, most evenings a week, there was the opportunity to analyze in close detail the progress of the assembly’s constitutional debates. It was here that the self-appointed guardians of the Revolution continued to define its objectives. Any member of the club whose revolutionary principles were deemed inadequate could be expelled. From 1790 political clubs all over France began affiliating themselves with the Paris Jacobins, and a nationwide correspondence network came into existence. Robespierre rapidly grasped its political potential. The counterrevolution was gathering momentum throughout the country following the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. He could see that a network of affiliated clubs of active revolutionaries was just what was needed to combat the threat posed by recalcitrant clergy and their supporters.

  In Arras, Augustin helped establish a patriotic club and wrote to Robespierre seeking affiliation with the Paris Jacobins. He painted an alarming picture of counterrevolution in Artois, where the patriots were strong but isolated and embattled. Exaggerating wildly, Augustin claimed that they were surrounded by flames after a series of unexplained arson attacks throughout the region. “We are not able to discover the instigators of these fires but are convinced that they are enemies of the public good.”31 He complained of the local government’s indifference to libels launched against the National Assembly. In particular he recounted an anecdote about Robespierre’s ex-friend Dubois de Fosseux, now mayor of Arras. A road builder in the village of Aire had received a libelous document that he reported at once to the mayor. “You have done well to bring it to me, it is very bad,” said Dubois de Fosseux. Upon returning home, however, the road builder found an anonymous letter explaining that the libel against the National Assembly had been sent to him so that he could read it to other peasants in his village, not report it to the mayor. Augustin implied that Dubois de Fosseux himself had sen
t the letter encouraging libel against the National Assembly. Robespierre was only too willing to think ill of Dubois de Fosseux after their falling out in Arras during the elections to the Estates General in 1789, so Augustin’s insinuation would not have been unwelcome. Even more striking, though, was Augustin’s hatred of the local clergy. “It is absolutely necessary to ransack our abbeys,” he wrote to his brother. “For it is among the monks that one finds monsters wanting to stain France with blood.”32 In another letter, Augustin mentions plans to convert the resources of the abbey of Saint-Vaast into more scholarships for local children, of the kind both he and Robespierre had benefited from, but comments that it would be more fitting to use the money to alleviate the suffering of the indigent over the coming winter. If he echoed his brother’s preoccupation with the plight of the poor, Augustin also shared a penchant for dark foreboding: “I cannot hide my fears from you, dear brother. You will seal the cause of the people with your blood.”33

  Even at this comparatively early point in the Revolution, Robespierre was so suspicious of “spies in every quarter of the city, and murderers assigned to assassinate patriots” that he feared the name Robespierre on the outside of an envelope would attract malicious attention. The intoxicating paranoia that would eventually permeate almost all his tactical decisions is already evident. “Reply to me, and put your letter in an envelope marked President of the National Assembly,” he tells his friend Buissart in March 1790.34 In April he writes, “Put your letters in an envelope addressed to the Deputies of Artois to the National Assembly.”35 And in May he tells Buissart, “I am going to send you a letter for my brother. I do not want to address it to him directly from fear that my name will entice aristocratic hands to violate the privacy of the post.”36 Still, it is important to note that Robespierre was not alone in entertaining such concerns. The daily newspaper Chronique de Paris carried this advertisement in October 1790: